White Water Rafting

Yes, it’s a bonny blue boat (photo courtesy of Kit Dunster) but empty, beached, bleached, and rather dilapidated …

Since The Autism of Gxd (2022) I’ve been silent – writing plenty but not slowing down enough to reflect in here. So, rather than disclose all life’s vicissitudes and bore myself and you, I’ll sum it up like this.
At around age ten, my school class learned this jolly little song:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream;
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream!
Even at age ten, this (then undiagnosed) autist found life a perplexing business, with an all too perplexing God at the apex. Imagine if it was all just a dream! and that (as Freddy Mercury would go on to sing) “Nothing really matters …” How I loved that song! I mean Row, row, row your boat (although who could not love Bohemian Rhapsody too). And how alluring Plato’s myth of the cave (Nick Cave!? – subject of another blog, another day … ;)) would be when I was introduced to it by my excellent Classical Studies teacher, a few years later (Please, please google Plato’s myth of the cave if you’re not familiar with it – let me know how it lands with you …). Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily – life is but a dream …?
But soon after, as luck (or providence) would have it, a youth leader came to our church and took us teenagers away for a couple of wonderful weekends … of canoeing! Up in the lovely, safe, placid River Conon in Strathconon. Out on the water, I forgot my cares and my fears. Not for nothing do we attune ourselves so readily to the abundant symbolism of water in the Bible. I felt safe and free, weightless, almost, gliding along in my canoe.
But these weekends were to be only brief and short-lived oases.
Forty years on (Biblical symbolism allures again) and it comes to me how life is – well, it’s more like white water rafting. Which doesn’t suit me well, being such a very risk-averse and fearful soul. Twisting and turning, paddling furiously from side to side to avoid the next rock, carried downstream in foaming fast water beyond very much in the way of control … no thank you! But so it is. For me, at least.
But I don’t know … recently, with the support of my recovery friends, I’ve negotiated some of the rapids and come through with just a taste of exhilaration.

Who knows.
Maybe I’ll hoist a sail and glide into heaven yet!